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How to Generate More Business in a Changing Market

By Jim Gillespie | October 31, 2007

I’m hearing from agents all over the country now about how their markets are transitioning. While some markets still remain hot, many others have buyers who aren’t quite as excited as they were before about buying properties. And in general the investment markets seem to be getting hit harder than the user markets, as companies still want to own their own properties and aren’t buying them based upon cap rates, cash flow, and rates of return.

What seems to be happening is there are fewer sale transactions going on, but the same number of brokers are still chasing the existing ones. So in the aggregate there are less total commissions being paid, which means that you need to close a higher percentage of the business in your area now than you did just a few years ago to earn and get paid the same amount of income.

And with this in mind I can talk to you about marketing and positioning yourself as the best choice your clients and prospects could ever make in a broker, but very few brokers want to spend the time and money to do this. And this is sad because if they did they’d learn how to completely dominate their own territory for many years to come. So what’s left are the basics…what almost every broker feels they should be doing more of but really doesn’t want to…and that’s prospecting.

When transactions were coming much easier you could do less prospecting because so many people wanted to buy properties. But things have changed in many areas and you may be experiencing this exact change yourself in your own business right now. So if you want to be maximizing your income in this market now, you need to be prospecting a minimum of 10-12 hours every week. Yes I know you probably don’t want to do this amount of prospecting, but ask yourself “How much money would I make if I prospected 10-12 hours every week over the next 12 months?” And if you like your answer to this question, just get your prospecting done with no excuses.

An old friend of mine, Mike Monteleone, CCIM, told me he still does 10-12 hours of prospecting every week in his business. And he credits his prospecting as the main component of his averaging over $42 million a year in sales production throughout his 35-year real estate career. So if Mike can still get 10-12 hours of prospecting done every week, you can get it done, too. It all comes down to you being committed to doing what will maximize your income in your business, vs. you buying into your own excuses and feeling more comfortable in not doing your prospecting.

If you really knew how much money not doing your prospecting was costing you at all times, you’d just get it done with no excuses.

And when it comes to the subject of taking action, one of my friends forwarded me a video of a man who finally decided to do just this in his own life. I’ve been on the Internet for more than 13 years now, and I receive over 600 E-mails a day. But I don’t remember an E-mail that’s impacted me in quite the way that this one has. So I want you to see this video to show you what’s possible when you take the action you know you must in your life.

This four-minute video shows Paul, a cell phone salesman in Great Britain, appearing on a show that seems to be similar to American Idol. He doesn’t look like much, and you can see by the expressions on the judges’ faces that they don’t really expect much out of him. But when he opens his mouth and finally begins to sing, something very magical begins to happen…

To see this video, click here.


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